Smart Makes Art With Its Own Oil

It’s no secret that the Smart brand positions itself as a patron of the arts, sponsoring more works than the House of Medici. The latest “Smart art” is both high-concept and high tech, using a robot to translate the sound waves from an accelerating fortwo into visual art.

To contrast the differences between internal combustion engines and electric vehicles, Berlin-based artist Nils Voelker recorded the sound waves from both gas and electric Smart fortwos and fed the data into a robot he created.

“I wrote a program that analyzes the sound files and creates images according to the frequencies and level information and the computer somehow tells the robot where to go to draw the final image,” Voelker said.

To represent the gas fortwo, he fashioned a device that let the robot paint on canvas with motor oil — kind of like a Logo turtle. For the EV, Voelker took the taillights off the Smart, attached them to the robot and took long-exposure photographs as the robot moved.

“The angle of the lines on the oil paintings is defined by the frequencies and the amount of lines by the level,” he said. “The route we drove starts on the top and ends on the bottom. On the light paintings the level defines the lengths, the frequencies and the color of the lines and the driven route goes along clockwise.”

The resulting paintings and photographs were exhibited as a part of the Smart Urban Stage, a traveling exhibition platform meant to examine the future of cities. The Urban Stage is currently set up in Berlin, and it will travel to cities across Europe over the next twelve months.

That’s Berlin’s Karl-Marx Allee in oil above, and by EV below.

“The engine is somehow the most important and necessary part of a car and in addition, it’s sound is maybe the biggest difference between an electric vehicle and one with a combustion motor,” he said. “And besides from that I just like the idea of making a sound visual and to combine two different senses this way.”

Here’s hoping Voelker’s work catches on. Not only would we love to put the sound of an accelerating 599 GTO above the sofa, but a ’68 MGB in our garage leaks so much oil we could leave a canvas under it and pass it off as a Jackson Pollock.

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